Friday, July 18, 2008

Nobody light a match.

She runs.

Rich.

Still, we have a car that keeps running, and without anybody's foot resting on the go pedal, which is an improvement. Last work weekend, the car made 1.5 laps around the block before falling into a mysterious coma, which I'm now comfortable blaming on fuel starvation.

As we had planned from the beginning, I cleaned and rebuilt the carb last week and managed to have almost no parts left over. In addition to the clean passages, new gaskets and more-or-less properly adjusted floats, it just looks better.

So it was a little disappointing when the starter didn't work. The lights dimmed, and video evidence shows a scary-huge arc somewhere around the battery (see pic), but nothing turned. It was late, and I was frustrated, so I folded. The next day, I whacked the hell out of the starter with a mallet and adjusted some body grounding. I'm not sure which one fixed it, but I know which one I prefer.

And it is definitely fixed, as the neighbors must know by now. After some sloppy idle mixture adjustments, the Mustag cranks right up and settles into a symphonic 1500 RPM idle. Once it warms up a bit and drops to a leisurely 1250, you can almost have a conversation if you keep your head low and don't breathe too much.

Spiders and squirrels used to live here, but it's back to the way a Ford product should be: hostile to life in general.

This motor is solid. It doesn't spit oil or coolant. It revs freely and very loudly. Confidence is high enough to begin looking at expensive safety gear. We are on the way.